Our biggest, silliest 40K buildings yet

The paint had barely dried on the Modular Urban Board Project before the terrain team here at the Beard Bunker, my buddies, my good time pals, the crew of Deep Space Nein, had booked some weekends in the diary. For why? Bloody big buildings, that's why. Making the multistorey Sanctum Administratus ruins told us how much we liked tall things. Tom sold me on the concept of a giant archway, and I had an as-yet unsatisfied yen for buildings connected by walkways.

And so we got together and spent an unbelievable amount of time cleaning mould lines off Sector Imperialis ruins. Games Workshop put the kits on Made To Order over Christmas 2024, and we... indulged. To the tune of some hundreds of pounds. "Two of everything" was I think where we landed, at an eye-watering £443. But, once you split that four ways, what you're really asking is "would I like to spend years fighting battles over some extremely cool buildings for £100?" to which, obviously, our answer was "yes."

As I often say, terrain is the titan you actually put on the table.

It's this kind of thinking that makes me want to put the phrase 'girl maths' right in the bin, because rationalising hilarious budgetary decisions isn't gendered, it's as universally human as breathing. Mind you I don't specifically have a replacement phrase lined up. Might try and make 'dork sums' happen, but  the zeitgeist wants what the zeitgeist wants.

Dork sums in action

This wasn't an entirely random choice; I actually did some feverish isometric drawings to try and figure out how many parts we needed to create certain structures:

Dork Heresy

Dork Millennium

We always knew there'd be a certain amount of experimentation once we had the kits in-hand, and even once you've cut the pieces out, there's a limit to the extent you can test fit successive floors without gluing the ground floor together, but Tom and I spent a while at least laying that out to get a sense of scale.

Dork Vengeance

Our basic layout for the big sexy archway agreed upon, we worked as a team, with Drew and Harvey doing the God-Emperor's work in the mould line cleaning mines, while Tom worked on converting ruined sections so that we didn't have too many repeating shapes right next to each other. Panel by panel, the first building came together:

The Dork Knight Rises

Dorkest Hour

Having built the big archway with the giant statues to be exactly how we wanted it, we then looked at the giant mount of parts we hadn't used, and set to figuring out what could be done with them. I took the view that walkways are cool. Of course, one never wants to make walkways mandatory, so with the addition of some clip-on Sector Mechanicus railings, said walkways become immodest balconies for Imperial authority figures to shout at people from:

A Scanner Dorkly

I then made a third and final ruin, with not one but TWO balconies, thus enabling all three buildings to connect to each other. Tournament tables became renowned for featuring some great by Ls, so naturally we have made a dumber, bigger L.

Fifty Shades Dorker

The first time I put all three of these buildings on the table I giggled at the size of them. The building with the big arch is actually two buildings joined overhead; medium-size vehicles like Ork Trukks can drive the whole way through the arch with room to spare, and if you're not too anal about base sizes as they move past the narrowest part of the arch, so can a Redemptor Dreadnought.

Obviously it's hard to convey scale in a 2D photo, but I set up some minis on the bridge to try and give you some sort of sense of it.

The Dork Crystal

Army of Dorkness

Note that the 2x2 floor section of the bridge (the part with the painted railings clipped onto it) is a drop-in piece; it can be removed and replaced with longer walkways, or indeed, the two buildings can butt up against each other, forcing the statues into a staring contest.

Speaking of removable bridges, having freestanding walkways enables the balconies to join together in all manner of ways depending on the layout that's needed:

I'll stop with the dork puns

One should commit to the bit, of course

This will also enable connecting any of these buildings to our Sector Mechanicus buildings, as well as the Sanctum Administratus' balcony.

The next step is to add rubble, and this will be a hideously extensive job. It's not enough to just toss stuff over the buildings willy-nilly; you have to check that miniatures can be easily placed, and it has to look good. Quality and utility both take time.

To make storage and adding rubble a little easier, we've kept the ground-level ruins as separate parts, like so:

And commit I did

But seriously

The thinking is that we can glue them down to styrene sheets; they'll technically be 1-2mm taller than they should be, but I don't think that'll make much difference, and will hopefully answer our structural concerns. The painting is less intimidating; we'll be doing it the same way as the Chapel. Hopefully with a bunch of us on it, we'll get there. Lord knows when we'll finish, but I'm confident that we will at some point... in the meantime, I'm just glad there's room for this stuff in my garage. It turns out 145L Really Useful Boxes are just over 15" tall (i.e. enough to handle three storeys of GW ruins) and girthy enough to handle this madness wot we hath wrought.

If I ever move into a flat I'm so screwed.